Tastes Like Home

Hi Everyone, Whether I am eating pepper raw, boiled or in pepper sauce, I like it so hot that I am barely able to breathe through my nose. I even have a technique: inhale through my mouth welcoming the cool air and then exhale through my nose; I can’t exhale through my mouth as the warm breath will only burn my tongue more.

We have been blessed to have the mother of hot peppers – the scotch bonnet; often we simply call them, “the big hot peppers.” It’s a pepper that’s associated with the Caribbean and made popular perhaps by the Jamaicans in their use of it in jerk seasonings. But it’s not only in Jamaica that this pepper is widely used, in fact, it’s the entire Caribbean. Ask a Trinbigonian making pelau and they’ll tell you they must put a pepper in de pot. Ask a Guyanese making cook-up rice, a Bajan making souse, a Grenadian making oil-down, a St Lucian frying saltfish, a Kittian making escoveitched fish, a Dominican serving up some fish co-bouillon or